Ways eyed to make planes easier to find in ocean

WASHINGTON — For nearly five years, government and industry officials have been exploring ways to make it easier to find
airliners and their critical "black boxes" that end up in the ocean. But their efforts are too late to help in the case of
a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared over the weekend.

The efforts were spurred primarily by the
search for Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic
Ocean en route
from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. It was nearly two
years later before the main wreckage of the Airbus A330 and
its black boxes — it data and cockpit voice recorders — were found
about 13,000 feet below the ocean's surface.

Since then, U.S., European, and industry
officials and technical organizations have discussed requiring
underwater locator
beacons on black boxes last at least 90 days instead of the
current 30, making the boxes so that they will float, attaching
underwater locator transmitters to the aircraft fuselage and
putting floatable emergency locator transmitters on planes, according
to a National Transportation Safety Board briefing Tuesday.

But those efforts are still a work in progress.

"I think at the time a lot of people were
looking at Air France 447 as unique," William Waldock, who teaches
accident investigation
at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "We
really had not had one like that where it takes so long
to find it."

But a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared over open ocean en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
on March 8, and has proved remarkably difficult to find.

Data recorders typically record over a
24-hour period at least hundreds of types of information about how a
plane is functioning.
Investigators count on that information for clues to the cause of
an accident, including how the engines are working, the
pilots' actions, the status of key systems like the autopilot and
autothrottle, and the position of wing flaps and rudder.

The cockpit voice recorders contain pilots' conversations and any sounds inside the cockpit in a continuous two-hour loop.

Both are required to be equipped with an
underwater locator beacon powered by a tiny radioactive pellet that
continually sends
out sonic signals for a minimum of 30 days. In recent years there
has been discussion about whether the beacon signals should
be required to last at least 90 days, according to the NTSB.

Even with a functioning beacon, the signal can only be heard underwater with special equipment and can diminish depending
upon the ocean depth, water currents and whether the boxes are buried in silt or sand.

There have been discussions about requiring boxes be made so that they float, and of attaching underwater locator devices
to the plane's structure to help find both the wreckage and the boxes, the board said.

Another idea that has been discussed is
whether airliners should have emergency locator transmitters — which are
different
than underwater beacons — that automatically detach and float to
the surface if the plane plunges into water. Such transmitters,
which employ satellite technology, only work above the water. The
U.S. Navy has had such floating transmitters on its planes
for about 15 years, Waldock said.

"It boils down to expense as much as anything," Waldock said. "These systems are pricey."

A technical advisory committee to the Federal Aviation Administration began a three-day meeting in Washington on Monday about
whether transmitter standards should be strengthened.

Some newer airliners already stream much of
the same information recorded by black boxes back to their home base via
satellite.
Airlines do this primarily so that they know whether there are any
problems with the plane that require maintenance or repairs.
If they get the information while the plane is still in-flight,
they can have mechanics and parts in place when it lands,
saving time and money.

But if planes also streamed back information
like altitude, airspeed and heading, it could also provide critical
clues to
searchers in the event of a crash. However, if all the thousands
of airliners that are in the air in the U.S. everyday were
all streaming large amounts of data at the same time, there
wouldn't be enough bandwith to transmit the data or enough capability
to record it on the ground, Waldock said.